Yes, it’s sugar in pimento cheese

This Classic Pimento Cheese comes together easily if you have a food processor.
Fred Thompson

This Classic Pimento Cheese comes together easily if you have a food processor.
Fred Thompson

The Masters golf event may be over. But in the spring, golf and pimento cheese are never over.

Besides barbecue, pimento cheese riles up more people than not. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about pimento cheese.

Above the Mason-Dixon Line, pimento cheese is still an oddity of the South, but I think the world is beginning to come around. Pimento cheese is showing up on restaurant menus. While pimento cheese is still widely used as sandwiches or a dip for crackers, it can add some good-tasting craziness to other dishes. A grilled pimento cheese sandwich is a taste of heaven. Stir some into a pot of grits or mashed potatoes. Top hot, fried green tomatoes with it, and let it ooze and mingle. Pull a page from Ben and Karen Barker and stuff it in pickled okra, as they like to call it, “Dixie Tapas.”

White bread, pimento cheese and watching golf on the TV – in spirit and food, you’ll be closer to the dogwoods and azaleas of Augusta.

Read Next

A sandwich grail is a personal thing. One person’s quest for a Philly cheese steak of perfection is another person’s search for the ultimate beef on weck.

Whatever your sandwich grail is, it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread to you, even if no one else gets it except people who grew up in the same place, eating the same thing. Perfection is in the details: You can’t just change out the brand of mayonnaise or swap in a bread that looks sort of like the right kind and achieve sandwich nirvana.